Hand-carved Picture Frame "River of Life" Motif

Art Historical Context

This rendering by Vera Van Voris, created around 1938, documents a hand-carved picture frame featuring the “River of Life” motif. Produced as part of the Index of American Design—a federal project that recorded exemplary examples of American decorative arts—the work preserves the details of a 3 1/8-inch-wide wooden molding through careful observation and draftsmanship. Such frames, often found in homes and workshops across the country, reflect the vernacular carving traditions that flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Van Voris used watercolor, colored pencil, graphite,...

About the Artist

Vera Van Voris

Vera Van Voris is an artist whose works have been preserved in museum collections in sufficient number to indicate a serious and sustained artistic practice, even though her biographical details — birth and death dates, nationality, and the particulars of her training — remain undocumented in the standard art-historical literature. Her distinctive name suggests possible Dutch or Central European h...